Literati and Self-Re/Presentation: Autobiographical Sensibility in the Eighteenth-Century Chinese Novel

This study of the traditional Chinese novel focuses on autobiographical features of The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglu meng), The Scholars (Rulin waishi), and the relatively neglected Humble Words of an Old Rustic (Yesou puyan). The author seeks to answer the question why the Chinese novel was becoming increasingly autobiographical during the eighteenth century, even as explicitly autobiographical writing was declining. He suggests that several new trends in the development of the genre (such as literati-ization) and the changing status of the literati contributed to the rise of this new feature. As office-holding became increasingly unavailable, new roles and identities that allowed the literati to retain a claim to membership in the elite had to be found. The novel, with its ability to distance an author from himself, facilitated the exploration of alternative roles and identities.